This chapter constructs the study’s conceptual framework, focusing first and foremost on detailing demobilisation. In particular, it clarifies that the outcome of interest is ‘negative demobilisation’, when collective action does not achieve its objective(s) but instead is compelled by internal and/or external factors to cease their activities. By drawing from extant research on demobilisation and on social control, the chapter formulates a typology of demobilising factors. Moreover, identifying several key causal characteristics of demobilisation processes relates to the methodological choices described in the following chapters. The second half of the chapter presents the rationale for studying demonstration campaigns in Germany, Austria, and England, most especially that the contextual variation helps ensure diversity in the demobilising factors present in cases and guards against the particularism of studying cases from only one country. The chapter explains the nature of that contextual variation by providing an overview of the relevant background to far-right activity in the three countries. Crucially, this background knowledge provides the basis for interpreting case evidence and building inferences in the case-study chapters.

This chapter draws together the findings from the connected analytical pieces and relates them to other cases and research from the fields of social movements studies and scholarship on the far right. As borne out by the case studies as well as by most of the cases covered in the qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), far-right demonstration campaigns are not typically mobilised around short-term rationales but instead are intended to endure. Since modes of institutionalisation are less open to far-right, particularly extreme-right movements, regular demonstrations are a convenient tool to maintain mobilisation and movement cohesion. The chapter highlights key findings of the study, including that counter-mobilisation by anti-far-right social actors is typically an indispensable factor in bringing about the demobilisation of far-right collective action.

This chapter traces the demobilisation process of the British National Party’s Red, White, and Blue festival campaign. The party had mobilised this campaign in attempts to reform its image and boost its electoral prospects, wanting to be known as family-friendly rather than fascist. The qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) locates it in the anti-far-right militancy pattern of demobilisation. By tracing the case, the chapter confirms the causation implied by the QCA pattern: militant counter-mobilisation drove a diminishing returns mechanism whereby increased costs of maintaining the campaign combined with decreased benefits, both directly resulting from private coercion, caused demobilisation.

This chapter introduces the book’s examination of the dynamics of far-right demonstration campaigns and their demobilisation. The chapter summarises the importance of these campaigns within the broader context of far-right movements and why they are illuminating cases for the study of demobilisation. It previews the book’s conceptual framework for understanding demobilisation, providing a theoretical basis for subsequent analysis. The chapter provides an overview of the empirical context for the study, drawing cases from Germany, Austria, and England between 1990 and 2020. Then, the chapter introduces the mixed-methods research design that is employed, combining both qualitative comparative analysis and process tracing to investigate these cases. The chapter concludes with the plan for the book, summarising the different chapters.

This chapter traces the demobilisation process of the German People’s Union (Deutsche Volksunion, DVU) Congress campaign. The party mobilised this campaign at the Hall of the Nibelungs (Nibelungenhalle) in Passau as a means of supporting its electoral prospects as well as propagating revisionist historical narratives championed by the party leader. This case represents the largest grouping of negative demobilisation uncovered by the qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), ‘civil counter-mobilisation’. Tracing the case helps identify a minimally sufficient causal explanation. The campaign faced private channelling that combined with internal factors to reduce participation in the campaign, as well as the removal of its preferred demonstration venue when local authorities approved the demolition of the Hall of the Nibelungs.

This chapter traces the demobilisation process of the Ulrichsberg Celebration campaign in Austria. Veterans of Third Reich military forces had mobilised the campaign with the intention of commemorating Wehrmacht as well as Waffen-SS soldiery, asserting that comradeship is sacred, regardless of whether it was in the service of Nazi aggression and criminality. The qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) finds it covered by the closing opportunity pattern of demobilisation. Process tracing shows that the case was causally overdetermined with two potentially sufficient demobilisation causes present. However, there are good circumstantial grounds to conclude that the causation implied by the QCA pattern was decisive, in that a mechanism of resource deprivation was at work once the state withdrew essential material support for the campaign, causing demobilisation through closing opportunity.

This chapter starts by transforming the demobilising factors elaborated in Chapter 2 into set-theoretic conditions and calibrating the degree of set membership for each demonstration campaign case. This enables a cross-case qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). Not finding any necessary conditions, the chapter proceeds to the sufficiency analysis, revealing four sufficient patterns related to the demobilisation outcomes: (1) closing opportunity, (2) state repression, (3) civil counter-mobilisation, and (4) anti-far-right militancy. The chapter unpacks these patterns and explains how they guide case selection for in-depth process tracing. The QCA findings are fundamentally based on set-relational observations, dataset-level findings. The three subsequent chapters transition to causal process observations in order to trace how factors combined and what mechanisms produced demobilisation. These case study chapters also check the causation suggested by the QCA by evaluating alternative causal explanations based on the conceptual framework provided in Chapter 2.

This chapter presents Ockham’s theory of demonstration in Summa Logicae III-2, the syllogism that produces scientific knowledge. He relies on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics and Grosseteste’s commentary it. Grosseteste, however, founded the necessity of demonstration on necessary relations in the world. For Ockham, the main challenge is to elaborate a theory of science that addresses the singular beings in a contingent world. His theory is characterized by a conception of purely logical necessity, a semiotic conception of cause, and the requirement that subject terms must have reference in order for affirmative propositions to be true. Many propositions about the natural world are not susceptible to demonstration in the strict sense, but Ockham distinguishes different kinds of demonstration. He is not so much trying to limit the field of demonstrable natural knowledge as to relax the meaning of demonstrability so that it includes many dubitable propositions that can be made evident.

The Introduction discusses the importance of public protest even in a digital era. It uses the mass demonstrations that followed George Floyd’s murder to highlight both a desire to participate in public dissent and the challenges that restrict that participation. Those challenges include police aggression and violence, enforcement of vague public order laws, restrictions on the place where protests can occur, and attitudes about public contention. The idea of a body of protest law and the concept of “managed dissent” are introduced and explained.

This introduction has three goals: to locate this book’s arguments in contemporary scholarship on Parmenides, to outline its methodology and structure, and to establish the stakes of the project as a whole. The first considers Parmenides’ invention of extended deductive argumentation and the practice of demonstration – the central topic of this book – as a relic of the ‘Greek Miracle’ paradigm; it also addresses discussions of Parmenides’ use of poetry and his relationship to Homer. The second addresses distinctions between actors’ and observers’ categories and between reasoning and discourse, and explores the Foucauldian discourse analysis that anchors the book’s treatment of the relationship between Parmenides and Homer. The third requires setting out what this book does not intend to do in order to specify its main contribution: providing an account of how Parmenides’ use of the image of the hodos helps him invent extended deductive argumentation and the practice of demonstration. The Introduction sketches out the three axes of the book’s argument: an exploration of the physical reality of archaic and classical Greek roads, a discussion of the semantics of the word hodos, and an articulation of the relationship between Parmenides’ and Homer’s poems.

This chapter pivots to Parmenides’ poem by examining at a more general level the close intertextual connections with Odyssey 12. I then examine in close detail how the krisis or exclusive, exhaustive disjunction in Parmenides’ Fragment 2 bears a close resemblance to the exclusive, exhaustive disjunction in the hodos that Circe spells out in Odyssey 12; I also detail important differences between Parmenides’ and Homer’s uses of this disjunction. Finally, I explore the importance of this disjunction for Parmenides’ groundbreaking extended deductive argument and, especially, its role in the practice of demonstration.

This chapter is in many ways the culmination of the book. It applies the analysis of chapters 3 and 4 to the structure of Parmenides’ Fragment 8, and shows how Parmenides uses the blueprint of Circe’s hodos in Odyssey 12 to craft what we would call an extended deductive argument; in this, it develops the discussion of Chapter 5. It cashes out the implications of Chapter 1 by showing how Parmenides takes advantage of rut road imagery to articulate what we would call a notion of logical necessity, and by showing how the durative and telic components of the word hodos define the teleological shape of his arguments. Building on Chapter 2, I set out the traditions Parmenides developed by creating a discursive structure that is both systematic and argumentatively rigorous. I also examine how the poem’s complex relationships between story, plot, and the time of narration plays a crucial role in bestowing on Parmenides’ arguments, and on demonstration more generally, an ostensibly timeless quality. Finally, I assess my conclusions about Parmenides’ invention of deductive argumentation in relation to other scholars’ discussions of his arguments, and clarify what my argument does not claim to offer – and what it insists on.

The chapter discusses the first of the fourteen books of Galens De Methodo Medendi in its Arabic summary (Jawami'), the summary's epistemological approach and its parallels and differences in comparision to the original Galenic work. Its ultimate source is placed within the Late Antique Alexandrian tradition of teaching philosophy and medicine, especially the introductions to philosophy and medicine, the so-called Prolegomena.

This chapter proposes a contextual approach to the history of early modern logic and method from the perspective of the late seventeenth-century debate over the relative worth of ancient and modern learning. Reflections on a modern “art of thinking” by authors on both sides of the debate contributed to the construction of an image of philosophical modernity at the high point of the Scientific Revolution, which would subsequently help fashion the self-understanding of the Enlightenment. This image was inherently polemical and pluralistic, as shown by analyzing the variety of canons of authors and by identifying the diversity of positions on the ingredients of the modern “art of thinking” in their writings. And yet the points of disagreement also reveal an underlying consensus about the core features a logic required: that an art of thinking would have to express the natural operations of the human mind, would ground the pursuit of the sciences, and would be capable of leading the mind to the discovery of genuinely novel and valuable truths about the natural world. This chapter also provides a reevaluation of the traditional canon of important thinkers who are thought to have spearheaded modernity.

translation across different natural languages and conceptual systems. While there is no totally neutral vocabulary in which this can be effected, this does not mean that mutual understanding is quite beyond reach, although that will depend on allowing for the revisability of some of the initial preconceptions in play. Comparing divergent schemata is indeed an important means of expanding the horizons of the history of science.